augmented.org

Damn, it’s about time to finally have a single post on the great researchers and programmers from Suomi! The VTT Team does a lot of impressive work with Augmented Reality. They currently focus on architecture AR and interieur planning as well as industrial applications and now also starting mobile solutions. They started off in 2000 with virtual ads for live broadcast TV. Moving on to more entertainment and game applications.

Their youtube channel shows some neat demos I also wanted to share (e.g. the architecture previz on location), but as the new video went online yesterday, I thought: Damn! This is cool! So I’ll focus on the single video here for you to enjoy!

Let’s quote their own description:

Photorealistic rendering for Augmented reality. Uses soft shadows, indirect lighting and image quality matching. Various materials like glass, chrome or plastic are possible. Lighting is automatically determined from a ping pong ball.

The matching is pretty advanced and though we’ve seen real light influence before, the demo looks amazingly realistic taking the information from a simple ping pong ball for the least hardware overhead (only one camera needed). Prettiest part is the refraction on translucent objects, where you can see the background tracing through. Usually we’d take a spherical camera for capturing environment information. Here they plausible-fake it by using the single background frame they acquire anyway. The ray-trace for translucent objects and intersect with a virtual plane (at marker height) to pick the underlying texel from the video frame. If they shoot outside the image plane, they will use mirrored and repeated textures from the single video image. Due to their good material models including BRDFs (won’t get started here) and a real-time post processor, we get these result to enjoy. So, if you don’t care for the technological mumble jumble: just watch it, it looks absolutely stunning.

Have a nice weekend! Great work, VTT! :-)

Hey everyone,

I’m happy to announce, that we can offer our readers reduced price tickets (15% off) for the upcoming ARWorld conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, as we are official Blog partner. You just need to book your ticket to the ARWorld online through us! Just use our code for registering on the ARWorld website. The code is:

The ARWorld is the new-born conference on Augmented Reality for business. Discover business opportunities with AR and mobile AR. The conference itself is not fixed to one industry sector. So there should be something to see for all out there. The keynote will be held by Nick Sohnemann from TrendOne, followed by 15 sessions and expert discussions. The two-day conference will start on November, 8th, 2010 in Hotel Nikko, Düsseldorf.

Unfortunately for some of you, it’s all in German, but we will do our best to cover the conference here as well in English. Buzz words and topics include the popular yet-to-come outernet, contextual targeting and location based services and of course mobile AR in general. There will be talks on social media components, AR games and industry use cases.

I consider the second day being extremely interesting, since it also deals with the topics on the future of AR (e.g. what will we be wearing technology-wise in 2020) and a dedicated session to usability and another to the gap and a possible bridging from VR/3D to AR. As a researcher I’d attend the latter sessions, since I always still see the problem of interaction and output. The mobile approach with a tiny touch screen is an interim solution and hopefully we get some new insights on future ways. But hopefully we get to see cool new Apps that work well today! Can’t wait for it.

For further details just check the web: www.arworld.de

Have a great conference!

- Toby

First of all, something on our own behalf. Since we got a lot of requests, augmented.org will now be twittering, too. It won’t be updates by the minute, but rather another channel for you to keep uptodate easily. So, please follow augmented.org on twitter if you are a fan of AR:

www.twitter.com/augmentedorg

Thanks.

Another thanks to all, who showed up at the Besser Online conference last weekend in Munich. We had a great panel with interesting questions regarding AR and location based services.

Evil Brother

Just las week I was blogging on Diminished Reality as another way to personalize your reality. Now, another video hit the air from the researchers at German Technology University Ilmenau. The project has been done by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll, both Department of Virtual Worlds / Digital Games. Be sure to watch the video below. For further information (in German) check their press release here.

The technology can serve extremely useful in Future scenarios. Simple idea would be to “clean up” your space to make room for another augmentation. If you wanted to buy a new couch using AR, you would end up with crummy graphics, if the new couch is smaller than the old one, so that it not completely covers the previous one (well, who buys a smaller couch??). We can imagine numerous fields of applications for movie productions or live broadcastings (remove brand names, license plates) and fun applications. If you have specific ideas, please share in the comments or at our Facebook site. I’d love to hear your ideas. Pretty practically speaking we could use it today to remove the black&white markers before augmenting the CG. :-)

If you are at ISMAR right now, be sure to check out the presentation.

Lots of more AR

If somebody of you speaks Japanese, please translate me the following on a new HMD! :-) The company DoCoMo shows a new prototype of a tiny HMD. Currently it only overlays images without a camera tracking. So far it’s too early for commercialization, though. Dang!

You’ve seen the MoMA guerilla art campaign, find out even more on new projects at Mark’s site! :-)

If you are looking for an IT job and want to augment your CV, now you can!

Do you want to shoot some UFOs? Now you can with your iphone! If you rather want to hunt monsters, go here!

Thomas found a nice red brick walled stage comedian show, where AR gets ripped on. Nice!

Mobile AR

Qualcomm finally opened their doors towards their SDK. It can be downloaded from their SDK website. To quote them from their press release: “Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality (AR) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android smartphones is now available for download in a public beta. This SDK will help developers build a new generation of AR applications that enable interactive 3D experiences to take place on everyday objects. The SDK utilizes computer vision technology to tightly align graphics with underlying objects and features support for image targets, frame markers, virtual buttons and simple 3D objects.”

… and keep in mind their Developer’s challenge, that opened up officially now, too. Grab the USD 125k first price! :-)

To get you started and inspired on mobile AR apps development, see the winners of the wikitude world cup!

Remove, don’t augment!

Another great demo, submitted at last year’s ISMAR, just went online on youtube. Francesco Cosco now documented his work in the web: their main focus was on integrating a robot-arm haptic feedback controller for interaction into their AR setup. But the by-product was even more impressing for me. To hide the ugly robot arm they mask it out in real-time. The term for this kind of trickery is diminished reality and is the evil twin brother of Augmented Reality. You will need reference images of the area behind the real object or interpolate missing areas. It works pretty stable and fast in the demo below. This could actually be another way of changing your personal reality one day. Don’t overlay existing ads (like in my Adbusting post), but rather get rid of whole elements. Of course we need to think of security, so you don’t bump into hidden cars. ;-)

Munich

Small note at the side: if you happen to be in Munich this weekend and are a journalist interested in web2.0 and technology, be sure to register for the Besser Online conference. Held at BR on 9th. I will be in the Augmented Reality Panel, talking about the fascination and future of AR. I’d be happy if you drop by and say Hi! :-)